ntozier
Thanks for your help with this issue, although i didn't end up using your suggestion i did get another solution to work for me.
the solution i used involved increasing the database size in the php.ini file - see link below
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12707822/how-to-increase-import-size-limit-in-phpmyadmin
after increasing the file size i created new backup for each of my databases and my privileges for each database and copied the php.ini fle to a backup folder and followed these instructions
1: uninstall xampp removing all data except the HTDOCS folder
2: restart server
3: Install xampp, do not run
4: Restart server
5: Check if xammp has started on startup (if so close it)
6: run Xampp as admin
7: install MySQL and Apache
8: start both services
9: click on the apache config and browse the php folder
10: copy the php.ini folder from the backup folder to the PHP folder (this will allow us to recover larger DB files)
11: Click on the MySQL admin button this will open PHPMyAdmin
12: Click new and create the osticket DB
13: when this is created click into it and go to import select the .sql file from your backup folder
14: allow this to run (may take some time)
15: you may get an error similar to mysql 1050 table already exists (this table does not exist and should not affect the recovery)
16: click on SQL and import the privileges from the old data base
hope this helps someone else 😁